Mastodon is a
Twitter-like social media that the cool kids started
using back in April. At first blush it’s just like Twitter. You post
messages about your breakfast, you follow other people to see their cat
pictures, and you get a little dopamine rush from social engagement.
Also maybe you share things of personal or public interest and help
build an important online culture. The
UI isn’t as polished and it doesn’t have as many features as
Twitter, but it’s good.

I don't like the default multi-column web UI. I'm using
this one column layout
instead but it's not particularly easy to install.
Halcyon is an alternate Mastodon
web client that is a Twitter UI clone; you can use it with any Mastodon account.
For iPhone apps
people recommend
Amaroq.

So why Mastodon? For me it’s because I’m angry
with Twitter’s endorsement of Nazis and want an alternative. Also
it’s fun to try something new. The big drawback is very little of
my community is there. But maybe it’ll grow! Also it’s good that
Mastodon is a different community than Twitter; the goal is to not
replicate all the awful community mistakes Twitter made. Hopefully the
abusers and Nazis and insane presidents will never join Mastodon or at
least will be filtered out somehow.

The big technical difference with Mastodon is it is
federated; instead of one single Mastodon server there’s
separate instances that communicate with each other. For casual use
the federation doesn’t matter since most everyone can talk to
everyone else across instances. But in theory it allows for diverse
communities with different standards. Also possibly some interesting
scaling properties. I’m a little skeptical about how this will work
as Mastodon grows, I don’t know that they have any magic solution to
Internet abuse. But I’m excited to see someone trying something
new.